Automating Social Media Exposure For Your Blogs

Anyone running a blog should be using social media to their fullest advantage. If you are then that is great, but if not then you will appreciate today’s topic.

Social Media Integration

If you are familiar with services such as Onlywire or Pixel Pipe, then you understand that just creating a singular post is not often enough to drive serious traffic to your website. Long gone are the days of “Post it and they will come”. (Field of Dreams reference).

In order to gain the most bang for your buck you need to actually have your content syndicated around the net, thereby gaining you exposure and additional backlinks. There are a number of ways to do this but most frequently they cost extra and in some cases may be cost prohibitive to beginners.

OnlyWire for example will post your content to your own social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many others (totaling 50 services at last count). But this is done at a monthly cost of around $13 per month for the basic account.

Sure this is not a lot to post have your content pushed out to your other networks. But, what if you could do it at no cost at all?

Now you might think this is a Plugin Of The Week Post, as it easily could have been, but didn’t pass our criteria for this recently due to a major upgrade.

We love this plugin, but anytime we see a major change to a plugin there is undoubtedly going to be some hiccups along the way, which is the only reason it is not this weeks POTW. Once they have gotten all things settled down on the upgrade we will re-visit this.

What NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster Does

According the the Plugin Authors:

This plugin automatically publishes posts from your blog to your Social Network accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+(Google Plus), Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal, FriendFeed, DreamWidth, Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Plurk, VKontakte(VK.com), YouTube, WordPress, etc. The whole process is completely automated. Just write a new post and either entire post or it’s nicely formatted announcement with backlink will be published to all your configured social networks. You can reach the most audience and tell all your friends, readers and followers about your new post. Plugin works with profiles, business pages, community pages, groups, etc.

But there is in fact more to it that you might not catch at first glance.

Let’s compare for example the OnlyWire Service. I have used OnlyWire in the past but often found that I was a little unsatisfied with the interaction of the service. For example, when you create a post that same post is pretty much exactly the same once posted to other services. While not a deal breaker it was a little bit of a pain to spend extra money just to repost exact copies out to 50 services.

In addition to this issue, OnlyWire posts are “tagged” as being “via OnlyWire”. This is a self-promoting issue which basically notifies anyone reading it where you posts are being passed through. Not sure of OnlyWire uses this to in some way grab referrals or even backlinks, but to me it becomes questionable to say the least.

The Staff over there at NextScript have given us a plugin that does the hard work of posting these to your various social accounts. and does so smoothly and without any reference to itself.

Yes, 100% White label posting of your own content.

Plugin makes 100% White Labeled Posts The main idea behind the plugin is to give you the ability to promote only yourself. Plugin uses your own apps and all posts to all networks come only from you. No “Shared via NextScripts.com” or “Posted by SNAP for WordPress” messages.

In addition to that, the plugin formats based on the service it is being posted to. That’s correct. Some systems can use Html for example, Others can include image support. Still others can attach Youtube channel feeds.

This means that the different services will not all be exactly the same basic message.

Another option we truly enjoy – Multiple accounts of the same type.

Yes, that’s right. For those of you who just happen to have multiple Twitter accounts, more then 1 Google+ or a hundred other WordPress blogs, this can post to them all. This means you can seriously ramp up your social media presence. Which means you have a much greater potential for traffic to your posts.

The Reason It’s Not POTW?

As we said earlier, this plugin has undergone some serious changes. The older version, 2.7 has been effectively discontinued at the end of October, 2013.

NextScript released the newest version, 3.0 on November 1st, 2013.

As a programmer I am a little disappointed with NextScripts releasing in this manner, (see posts about OSE Firewall for more details), as I feel that major releases should be beta released first. There is no reason they could not overlap the two version and test the newest before putting into production.

To their credit though they have been right on top of fixing the bugs found in this release having made several updates over the last few weeks. The level of their support has meant the difference to me. I can overlook the early releases if they are committed to the product development and I truly believe they are. My hat’s off to these guys doing the bug fixes.

Below are the recent updates as of November 1st, 2013.

3.0.9 [11/18/2013]

New – %FULLTITLE% tag will insert processed title.

Bug Fix – YouTube – Google+ page setting were not saved.

Bug Fix – LinkedIn – Titles for groups were ignored.

Bug Fix – Set Time was not working in Firefox.

Bug Fix – Plurk authorization problems.

Bug Fix – Individual Category Excluded was breaking autoposting.

Bug Fix – WordPress tag were broken

3.0.8 [11/18/2013]

Improvement/Bug Fix – OG:Image will be taken the same way as “Post image”, not as small thumbnail.

Bug Fix – Language/Localization files were not working.

Bug Fix – WordPress to WordPress – Excerpts were incorrectly encoded.

Bug Fix – Reset reposting time after the change.

Bug Fix – Check if posts status is still “Published” at autoposting time.

3.0.2 [11/01/2013]

3.0.1 [11/01/2013]

New – Auto-repost existing and already posted posts based on some rules  one-by-one from old to new, one-by-one from new to old, from specific dates, “older then N days and younger then X days”.

New – Add auto-posts to the query that will be posted according to some specified rules (like “two posts per hour”)

New – Select what image to use for “Image” and “Attachment” post types if post has several images

New – Custom URL for posts

New – App.net Support

New – Reddit Support

New – Deviantart Support

New – Reset all Settings for existing posts.

New – Extended debug info.

New – Ability to send errors by email.

New – New Option  How to handle spaces in hashtags.

Improvement – Comments import has been completely redone. Disqus and usernames should be correct now.

Improvement – Code was optimized for lighter footprint

NextScript Social Auto Poster General Feature List

With the recent change over to a new version the developers have been hard at work adding new features and updating bugs. ?Below is a list of the standard version features that will cover most websites.

Message Formatting Tags

Assign categories to each Social Network

Tags/Categories posted as Hashtags

Auto-import comments from Facebook as WordPress Comments

Auto-import replies and mentions from and Twitter as WordPress Comments

Related Topics

Categories

Derek is a Online Web Professional. He works with clients and customers in order to implement Web-Based solutions for businesses. These include websites, SEO, marketing, and company branding. His own company, Shadow Dragon Unlimited has been providing these services to local businesses in his Western Massachusetts area and online since 2003.